Has Hamas fulfilled its threats? A large explosion occurred on a bus on Shaul Hamelech Street at the center of Tel Aviv, not far from the Kirya. According to reports from the fied, many rescue forces are heading to the scene of the event, with at least 13 casualties reportedly evacuated. A suspect is being held for interrogation on suspicion of involvement in the attack.

According to information i’m hearing on the local radio stations, the police are also ordering that the Azrieli shopping center (Israel’s biggest and most crowded, since it’s right on top of a major bus and train station) be closed, which is a disturbing first. Apparently they’re worried that another attack could be headed in the direction of the shopping mall..

The “ostensible” reason given for this protest is that the Egged buses go through the very narrow streets of this neighborhood at top speed, therefore endangering the children and other residents who have to pass by on the narrow sidewalks which can only accommodate pedestrians walking in a single file.

That is total bullcrap. I have walked on these sidewalks and I have traveled on these buses. They have been going through these streets at top speed since forever and nobody has ever complained about it.

The real reason is that Egged has refused (and rightfully so) to segregate men and women on the #1 and #2 routes, so a small minority of crankholes has taken it upon themselves to prevent the buses from proceeding, by throwing their own babies in the path of the bus!

Bob Levinre: #7 Alouette Let's say you were going to diagnose this problem--as in, how do things get to this point? The Torah is very careful to establish the importance of belief, not just having belief, but that the gyroscope within ...

Roadside mines have killed 23 civilians in southern Afghanistan, with a minibus and a tractor struck separately by explosives in Helmand province, according to officials.

The minibus was travelling from Nahr-e-Saraj district to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, when it hit a mine and all 19 people inside were killed, said Kamaluddin Shirzai, deputy police chief for Helmand.

When security forces arrived at the scene they were attacked by Taliban insurgents, said Hekmatullah Akmal, a police commander.

He said it appeared at least 17 people had been killed but the damage from the blast made it difficult to determine how many people had been on the bus.

A Yemeni air force jet mistakenly bombed a bus Wednesday in a southern town controlled by Islamic militants, killing four people, as clashes between the fighters and government troops left 23 dead on both sides.
Government forces have been trying for days to drive out the fighters who seized Zinjibar last month. The takeover of the town signaled that Islamic militants are taking advantage of the political turmoil that has gripped Yemen since a popular uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rule began in mid-February.

The fighters — some of them believed to be linked to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch — have taken over several towns in the south, far from the reach of the central government in the capital, Sanaa.

Richard Couch is, essentially, in the same line of work as Atticus Finch.

From a modest, spare law office in an Oxford industrial park, Couch has taken on a long list of defendants, often as a court-appointed attorney. Most of his clients are young, he tells me, and poor. Many of them are people of color.

When I ask why he keeps doing this work, he doesn’t mention his father — the man who, 50 years ago this week, joined a mob of Klansmen who attacked a Freedom Riders bus just outside of Anniston.

He talks, instead, about his experiences in an Oxford elementary school.

“You know, those schools didn’t integrate until the late ’60s or early ’70s,” he said. “When I was in first grade, there were just two black kids in the whole school. And those kids caught hell.”

Couch recalls seeing white students “beat the snot out of” a black classmate. No one lifted a finger to help. No one spoke out.

“If you want to talk about something that bothers me, that bothers me,” he said. “That’s really disturbing.”

On Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, just outside of Anniston, a mob of around 200 white men, angry and chanting hate slogans, stopped the Greyhound bus carrying 13 Freedom Riders, in addition to other unsuspecting passengers. The men hammered the vehicle with sticks and pipes and slashed its tires. When the bus driver somehow managed to maneuver the bus free of the crowd, a convoy of cars followed it.
Riding on its rims with sparks flying, the bus finally could go no farther and stopped next to McKinney’s home and adjacent grocery store. As the angry mob surrounded the bus, the white bus driver ran off. Watching, McKinney saw a hand with a crowbar or heavy chain emerge above the crowd and smash out the back window of the bus. In the next moment, someone threw an incendiary device through the broken window, instantly filling the bus with roiling black smoke.

“The people on the bus were gagging,” she recalled. While some of the passengers lay down on the bus floor in search of air to breathe, others, including an elderly black woman, panicked. Meanwhile, the crowd yelled out epithets, McKinney recalled. “They were saying things like, ‘Roast those n*****s alive.’” There were reports of people outside the bus holding the bus doors shut to prevent anyone from escaping. Then, something in the bus exploded, forcing the mob back and giving the passengers a chance to break out of the burning vehicle.

The explosion appears now to have been caused by an 1-2 kg explosive device with shrapnel in a bag or backpack at the bus station across from the Jerusalem Conference Center in central Jerusalem. Reports vary between 25 - 30 injured, and CNN is reporting that four are seriously injured. It exploded outside the Egged number 74 bus, which led to initial reports of the bomb being on the bus. The bus is largely intact with some windows blown out.

A bus exploded in Jerusalem on Wednesday near a bus station, witnesses reported, causing an unknown number of casualties.MSNBC
Dozens of ambulances converged on the station, located in a Jewish neighborhood, Reuters reported, citing Israeli TV and radio.

CNN Live coverage shows windows blown out but the bus is relatively intact.
CNN Breaking news tweet indicates 4 seriously injured (9:45 am Eastern)
NPR and other coverage indicates that bomb was not on bus, but was an explosive device near two public houses, was not a suicide attack.Jerusalem Post Coverage

A passenger bus hit a roadside bomb today while traveling in the restive southern Philippines, leaving a soldier and four civilians wounded, witnesses and police said.

Regie Magbanua, among the passengers of Grand Courier Company, told reporters they were heading to the southern city of Davao from Tacurong around 5:30 a.m. when a homemade bomb placed by unknown men along the road exploded as they reached the town of Datu Paglas in Maguindanao province.

The rear portion of the bus was hit, Magbanua said, adding the incident occurred just 200 meters from a military detachment.

Senior Superintendent Marcelo Pintac, a provincial police director, said they are investigating the attack.

Motown has no use for the anti-Muslim ads plastered across the sides of buses in New York City.

Detroit’s SMART bus system has rejected the button-pushing placards that read “Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?” - and direct Muslims to a Web site urging them to leave the “falsity of Islam.”

“It’s a purely anti-Muslim hate issue,” Dawud Walid of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told the Detroit News on Friday.

“The SMART bus company, or any bus company, should not be used to marginalize a minority group.”

Defenders of the ads, dreamed up by Manhattan-based right wing blogger Pamela Geller and the New York-based Stop the Islamization of America, say it’s a free speech issue and they have sued.

FYI, advertising is not free speech; advertisers pay for that privilege. Media is allowed to filter messages however they want.

“Americans have a right to know the truth; Islam is a religion of intolerance and violence,” said Michigan lawyer Richard Thompson, who filed the suit.

“Christians, Jews and other non-Muslim minorities are persecuted in every country where Islam dominates.”

The MTA has not tried to remove the 40 ads, which Geller said cost her group $10,000 for a one-month run, because they do not violate agency advertising guidelines.

In April, the Miami bus system at first rejected the ads but relented when Geller’s group threatened to sue.

A leader in the fight against the proposed mosque near Ground Zero who has Tea Party ties, Geller has been branded a bigot by CAIR and other groups.

She also caused a stir in the right-wing blogosphere by videotaping a denunciation of Palestinian terrorists - while dressed in a bikini.

WWJD?

In an interview with The Daily News, Geller said she didn’t care if Muslims were offended by the ads. “Will it bother Islamic supremacists? Yes,” she said.

The funny part is that they don’t even realize that they themselves are religious idealists. I wonder how these Christian supremacists would react to an ad campaign aimed at them, mentioning abortion bombers and murdering homosexuals… For the record, I’d be against that too…

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Justice Department Spokesman Marc Raimondi released the following statement Tuesday: "Three documents - a criminal Information, a plea agreement, and a statement of facts - were filed today in the United States District Court for the Western District of ...

Morgan Whitaker exposes where wingnuts are getting their "information" on "the evil, un-American, Kenyan, Marxist Muslim" Obama. This story is about a year old, but its still relevant today. David Jackson, of Belmont, NC, does not like President Obama. He ...

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Curt Schilling showed a young punk you don't mess with his daughter on twitter. Schilling's fond paternal congratulations were met with "tweets with the word rape, bloody underwear and pretty much every other vulgar and defiling word you could likely ...

In this era of raw nerves, protests and increased tensions, Americans really want leadership. It's natural for the public and the media to desperately seek out examples that appear to affirm that our nation is changing for the better. ...

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Earlier today interested Redditors posed questions to Poitras and Greenwald in Los Angeles, while Snowden posted from Moscow. A rare opportunity for average people to directly communicate with the (in)famous leaker.See the entire discussion HERE Redditor masondog13 asks: What's the ...

Wait a minute... watching Fox News and the Republican talking heads I learned that all Muslims are bad bad bad and in no way can Islam be interpreted as any sort of peaceful religion. news.yahoo.com OSLO (Reuters) - More than ...

For the last three years it's been my privilege to help coach a dedicated group of young women who have founded the first Women's Flat-Track Roller Derby league in Israel. They've learned, trained, fought, and worked unbelievably hard to bring ...

Added bold is all mine. this was an awkward way to go about gun control anyway. It clearly impacts the law abiding far more than felons, and is by that definition inefficient and intrusive at best. Gonna have to do ...